Joyce Carol Oates has talked about why she has written a portrait of President Woodrow Wilson as a "bigot" in her forthcoming novel The Accursed.

The 74-year-old writer, who has been nominated three times for a Pulitzer Prize and who is a National Book Award winner, has set her new novel in 1905 and featuring authors Upton Sinclair and Mark Twain, and soon-to-be commander-in-chief Wilson — then president of Princeton University — as central characters.

Oates, who has taught at Princeton since 1978, was asked in a Q&A with The Seattle Timesabout portraying the 28th President of the United States in her 'Gothic novel' novel as a hypochondriac and drug addict, who is paranoid and tainted with racism from his Southern upbringing. Oates replied: "Except for consorting with 'demons' — all of this is true. But everyone in that era took drugs in a way that would seem astonishing to us in 2013, including opiates. Wilson was highly bigoted, contemptuous of women’s suffrage as he was of 'Negroes,' but he was not a monster so much as representative of his era. The novel explores the tragic limitations of the era’s Christian leaders — and the rise of a younger generation with an interest in social justice, egalitarianism, women’s rights and evolution."

Wilson (above, pitching the first ball of the 1916 baseball season) was president for two terms (1913-1921), and campaigned in 1916 on the slogan 'He kept us out of war', after maintaining America's neutrality in the First World War.

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Oates was also asked about Twitter (she follows comedian Steve Martin on the social networking site) and replied: "Twitter is a radically new way of communicating, at least on its higher, more idealistic levels. It’s a forum for the exchange of haiku-like impressions, insights and poetry. Also a kind of broad magazine in which individuals provide links to features and videos of interest."